I Screwed Up

I need a new adding machine

A few weeks back, I wrote that this week's game against Dartmouth would be Columbia's 1,000th varsity football game in school history.

I was wrong.

A careful counting of each and every game on our books actually shows that the team had played 998 games coming in to this season. That means our 1,000th game was the week two loss to Towson.

Ugh.

So this will be the 1,004th game in varsity history, our 367th Ivy game since the league was officially formed in 1956, and the 79th meeting with Dartmouth.

Not exactly nice round numbers... but big numbers anyway.

For the record, the first Columbia-Dartmouth game was played in 1899 at Manhattan Field, which stood adjacent to the Polo Grounds. The Lions won that game 22-0. William McKinley was president, and shares of Lehman Brothers traded at 15 cents a share... a 900% premium over today's Lehman share price.

Dartmouth actually played a number of games at the Polo Grounds over the years in the days when travel to Hanover was much tougher than it is now, (it's still not easy).